Friday, February 10, 7PM
Logan Center Exhibitions Gallery
This live performance by Whitney Johnson/Matchess will take place inside Heather Kai Smith & Ali Fesser's exhibition Pawing the Ground in Place acting as a further activation and annotation of the exhibition’s concerns with representations of utopian fantasy and longing. The sound work for this performance can be heard in advance during gallery hours on February 10th in anticipation of Whitney Johnson/Matchess's participation later that evening.
Whitney Johnson (Clearfield, Pennsylvania) is an artist who interprets the unknown with sound. She composes with the viola, as well as sine waves, tuning forks, electronics, organ, vocalization, reel-to-reel tape looping, cassette tape sampling, and field recording. Her latest release, Sonescent (2022, Drag City), recreates the experience of 10 days of silent Vipassana meditation in Joshua Tree, CA where she heard “the last minutes in the life of music.” Three recent works have engaged with skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on the body. The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) each consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique that uses binaural beats to induce a relaxed or energized mental state. In the Matchess Trilogy (2013-2018, Trouble in Mind), she used the limited palette of a 1960s Ace Tone Top-5 combo organ, an analog Rhythm Ace drum machine, viola, and voice to craft transient sound collages on beds of droning ambient noise. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018, and she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2022. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sound and Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Instructor in the Sound Arts and Industries MA program at Northwestern University.
Presented alongside Logan Center Exhibitions as part of their exhibition Pawing the Ground in Place